PHILOSOPHY WEB RESOURCES
HIPPIAS SEARCH ENGINE
Type in any philosopher's name, "John Stuart Mill," say, or any philosophical term, such as, "Solipsism," click on "Search" and HIPPIAS will retrun a list of sites on the web that match your entry. Use "*" for substring searches. "Plat*," for example, will return entries for "Plato, " "Platonism, " "Platonic, " etc. Hippias was launched on August 10, 1997.
Hippias is the second search engine on the internet to use the LASE
technology developed by Anthony F. Beavers and Hiten Sonpal at the
University of Evansville. The Argos Project, a limited area search
engine dedicated to ancient and medieval internet resources, was the
first.
These larger internet indices are based on the notion that a broad
search of the internet is more desirable than a narrow one. Such an
ideology, if you will permit that term in this context, allows these major
search engines to be useful to everyone everywhere in any field of study
whatsoever. But the cost of such wide-spread appeal is the frustration and
inefficiency that comes with using them for defined purposes. The idea
behind a limited area search engine is otherwise. By limiting the range of
the search engine, a LASE strips out many unwanted references, but at a
cost. (If you wanted to know about Plato, the suburb of Chicago, for
instance, Hippias is not the place to look.) The result is a higher
quality index built for a specific purpose and for a smaller audience.
Furthermore, the quality of the index, its purpose and the level of
specialization expected of its intended audience are variables that can be
manipulated with LASE technology. For example, a particular LASE could be
designed using very strict procedures to create a resource for medical
doctors that provided access to only scientifically-verified medical
reports; another could be designed for a broader audience using less
strict selection criteria when deciding what and what not to include
within the search window of the LASE.
Associates Sites presently include Course Materials in
Philosophy (edited by Andrew Carpenter, Antioch College). Course Materials in
Philosophy is a systematic collection of syllabi, handouts, and other
course material; it welcomes submissions from philosophy teachers.
David Chalmers' Philosophy
Resources (edited by David Chalmers, University of California, Santa Cruz). This
site contains many resources in the philosophy of mind and links to online
philosophy papers. Ethics Updates (edited by Lawrence M. Hinman, University of San Diego)/. Ethics Updates
provides guides to World Wide Web resources on a wide range of
contemporary moral issues and topics in moral theory; it also offers a
calendar of upcoming ethics conferences, links to syllabi of ethics
courses, discussion forums, and a special forum for the discussion of
prepublication versions of ethics papers. Guide to
Philosophy on the Internet (edited by Peter Suber, Earlham College). Suber's Guide is a comprehensive
collection of philosophy resources on the internet, continually updated.
The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (edited by James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin). The
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a growing collection of articles on
many figures and topics; it seeks contributions from professional
philosophers. Noesis: Philosophical Research
On-Line (edited by Anthony F. Beavers, University of Evansville). Noesis is an
index and search engine of philosophical content written by professional
philosophers. It indexes essays, lectures and other course materials,
images, graphs, charts, book and article reviews, primary texts,
bibliographies, chronologies, and glossaries.
Philosophy in
Cyberspace (edited by Dey Alexander, Monash University). Philosophy in Cyberspace
is an extensive, annotated index of philosophy resources organized into
over 50 topical categories and updated regularly.
The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(edited by Edward N. Zalta, Stanford University). The Stanford
Encyclopedia is a 'dynamic' encyclopedia of philosophy that is responsive
to new research -- authors have ftp access to their entries to keep them
up-to-date and a select Board of Editors monitors and referees all entries
and updates. Argos: Limited Area
Search of the Ancient and Medieval Internet Argos is Hippias' older sibling in using the limited area search
engine (LASE) technology developed at the Unviersity of Evansville. It
uses the same system of peer-review that Hippias uses to limit the range
of responses to ancient and medieval resources.The Perseus Project:
An Evolving Digital Library on Ancient Greece
The Perseus Project includes several of its own search engines that
provide access to information not covered by Hippias, including standard
Greek editions of works by Plato and Aristotle. Some of these that might
be of interest to philosophers include the: English Index to the
Database, and Greek Word Search of
Primary Texts, and English Word Search of the
Liddell, Scott and Jones Greek Lexicon, and an engine for All Primary Texts (Greek and
English).
The overall quality of Hippias is determined by a system of
peer-review. This system is based on an "accreditation" model of
legitimating resources, rather than a "referee" model. This system is chosen
because accreditation models are designed for works,
institutions, etc. that change over time and that may, in the process of
their change, fall below certain standards. The associate sites accredit
other sites by including them in their indices; when, and if, these sites
fall below the standards established by the associates, they are removed
from the associate site and, at the same time, from the Hippias search
window. This procedure allows authors to take advantage of the
flexibility (that is, revisability and expandability) that comes with
internet publishing without having to abandon quality-control altogether.
Any page that turns up in a Hippias search may, therefore, be thought
of as accredited, or certified, by the editorial board. This does not
mean that the content of every page delivered by Hippias is true,
whatever that may mean to philosophers, any more than every statement made
by a faculty member at an accredited educational institution is true. It
does mean that the page is delivered as a viable beginning for the
academic study of philosophy. Students who are using Hippias for their
research must play the role of scholars and evaluate the quality of
resources themselves by confirming claims in more than one source,
carefully considering issues and evaluating arguments, etc. Such a process
does not impede students from a scholarly entry into the study of
philosophy; more so, it introduces them to the "art and science" of true,
hands-on scholarship, and, if used with proper guidance, may even sharpen
their critical skills. Teachers and those "in the know," so to speak, will
have to exercise the same judgment they use when choosing which books to
cite and which to skip. Hippias does not intend to replace these more
personal aspects of scholarly life. (Even within these limits, users may
think of Hippias as a library at an institute of higher learning. Like a
library, Hippias "contains" many texts, and all that the user can be
certain of, as when approaching any university library, is that someone
with academic credentials somewhere thought that this particular text was
important enough to include in the library.)
Hippias was funded by grants from the University of Evansville. It went on-line to the public on August 10th, 1997, at 8:00 p.m. CDT. It has made more than 166746 searches of philosophy on the internet since that time.
URL: www.stanley.feldberg.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Courses.html
November 27, 1998
teuber@brandeis.edu
Andreas Teuber's Home Page